I found this site, www.bookemon.com, and I was curious if anyone had tried it. What we want to do is add stories, pictures and stuff like that, then print it out for him, and have it look professional.

Does anyone have other suggestions for good sites or similar tools?

Arun Vishnu

December 14, 2012 at 10:08 am

google cloud print may be useful.

Debra Beshears

November 29, 2012 at 6:50 pm

You might like to look into Blurb.com. They have an app you can download called, 'BookSmart'.

We have had a good experience using lulu.com. The tools are very easy to use. They hold your hand basically throughout the process (or not if you want to do the steps yourself).

Createspace.com by Amazon is another one I have tried that works pretty well. i even used cafepress.com to make on demand books. I'm not sure cafepress still makes custom books.

The problem with all these on demand book makers is the price of individual books. You can get huge volume discounts but nothing like a local printer will give you. Some printers will print a 100 page book for you at $1 a pop if you order 1000. That beats all the sites mentioned by a mile.

For the convenience though and friendliness we like lulu.com the best for my mother's book. We have printed 1500 copies over the years in drips and drabs. Usually the cost has been around $5-$6 a book for a 125 page one where we ordered 25 at a time. That's for a novel type book. Picture books with color pictures are of course more expensive.

Some books stores now have on-demand book making machines. An example is Politics and Prose in Washington DC: http://www.politics-prose.com/opus. They charge $8 for up to 200 pages book. I don't think their site has any Wizards like lulu.com does. I'd expect you have to make your PDF files according to templates .

Also, some time ago I used LaTeX to format and cleanse a class report for a friend and then got it printed and professionally bound. The result was very nice, impressing.(She ended up marrying someone else, though).

Just use a word processor such as Word 2010 and take finished document to a printer to make copies and bind your book. If you can get a publisher interested, you could even have it done for free and even make a profit.

Dave Parrack

November 28, 2012 at 1:07 am

I don't know of any free options that exactly fit your criteria but you can self-publish a book using Lulu (lulu.com).